TWiV 858: The vax of life with John Mascola

January 27, 2022

John Mascola joins TWiV to discuss the history and mission of the NIH Vaccine Research Center, how it prepared for devising pandemic vaccines, and development of the COVID-19 vaccines.

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Rich Condit, and Brianne Barker

Guest: John Mascola

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Download TWiV 858 (130 MB .mp3, 109 min)
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Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees

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3 comments on “TWiV 858: The vax of life with John Mascola

  1. Alessandro Rosa Jan 28, 2022

    In Damien’s letter, the TWiT episode was talking about J. Craig Venter’s JCVI-syn3.0 synthetic bacteria line, which was reported in March 2016 in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aad6253

    Back in 2016 J. Craig Venter’s group was credited with creating a synthetic cell “that contains the smallest genome of any known, independent organism.” -https://www.nature.com/articles/531557a

    If you read a little further in the nature article you will see that it says “Eventually, the team hit on the 531,000-base, 473-gene design that became known as JCVI-syn3.0 (syn2.0 was a less streamlined intermediary). Syn3.0 has a respectable doubling time of 3 hours, compared with, for instance, 1 hour for M. mycoides and 18 hours for M. genitalium.”

  2. I tried Wordle and found it was almost exactly like a flash game I used to play called WordSpector. WordSpector had many variations within the game, and lasted for hours! I am hoping to find it again.

  3. Jon Wurl Jan 29, 2022

    I have to say that is was funny in a good way to watch this, and see Alan, Vincent, Rich and Brianne nodding in agreement simultaneously with Dr Mascola. Thanks for one of the better recent TWiV episodes.